Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for facilitating the use of virtual disks. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to a method and system for optimizing the execution of a startup process that reads blocks from a virtual disk.
Related Art
Virtual machines executing on computer systems can be managed from virtual disks within the computer systems. For example, a virtual machine executing a guest operating system on a personal computer may be loaded into memory on the personal computer by executing a boot-up process that reads blocks from the virtual disk. In addition, changes made to the virtual machine and/or snapshots taken of the virtual machine may be stored in the virtual disk so that subsequent execution of the virtual machine may utilize the changes and/or snapshots.
However, the loading and execution of a virtual machine from a virtual disk may be slow and/or inefficient. In particular, adjacent blocks in the virtual disk may be written to locations that are distant from one another on a physical disk (e.g., hard disk drive (HDD)), resulting in increased latency and/or seek times for I/O operations that read blocks from the virtual disk. A boot-up process that loads a guest operating system from the virtual disk may thus execute more slowly than a boot-up process that loads a host operating system directly from the physical disk.
Hence, what is needed is a mechanism for increasing the speed of boot-up processes that load virtual computing environments from virtual disks.
In the figures, like reference numerals refer to the same figure elements.